The Book of Cold Cases

by Simone St. James

Something about the Greer mansion stifled laughter and killed happiness.

By 1975, both Julian and Mariana were dead, Julian with his blood all over the kitchen floor, Mariana in the twisted wreck of a car crash. The house watched all of it happen, indifferent.

A thriller: a woman in danger, most of the characters possibly lying, everything not quite as it seemed.

A twist somewhere near the end that would either shock me or wouldn’t. There were dozens of books just like it, hundreds maybe, and they were the soundtrack of my life.

But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable. It was dark comfort, but it was still comfort. I knew my own tally by heart: My would-be killer had been in prison for nineteen years, seven months, and twenty-six days. His parole hearing was in six months.

In 1977, Beth was twenty-three, beautiful, and rich. Her family lived in a mansion in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood, Arlen Heights.

Her father had died in 1973, shot during a home invasion that was never solved, and her mother had died in a car accident two years later, leaving Beth alone in the house with an inheritance of millions. Beth had red hair, and she owned a trench coat. She also owned a car like the one the witness had seen. She said she’d been home at the time of both murders, drinking alone.

But some places hold you so that you can’t get free. They squeeze you like a fist.”